One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
—ALBERT CAMUS
Mary Ong and I sit in her safe house in the compound of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Surrounding the compound is a 10-foot wall, and surrounding the wall is Camp Aguinaldo, separated from Manila by another wall. The government feels it needs concentric ramparts, an elite force, and an entire army to protect Ong. “Not from the Triads,” Victor Corpus, chief of Army Intelligence, informed me when he okayed my visit. “From the police.”
At the moment, the 47-year-old Ong is showing me the evidence she’s presented to three Senate committees investigating Ping Lacson’s running of the PNP. Ong’s catalog of criminality, combined with the testimony of corroborating witnesses, led the committees to table a 100-page report in June 2002. “Kidnapping-for-ransom [and] drug trafficking have been prima facie established,” was the report’s conclusion, followed by a recommendation to refer the evidence to the Department of Justice “for filing of appropriate criminal charges against the persons named below …:” That is, against Lacson and 10 of his senior officers.
Today, February 3, 2003, the named officers are still enforcing the law from Camp Crame, and Ping Lacson is an esteemed member of the Senate’s Public Order and Illegal Drugs Committee, having used his senatorial influence to get Committee Report No. 66 shelved. This typically Filipino development, coupled with Lacson’s announcement that he will be running for president, has sent Chief Corpus’s fears for his government’s star witness into the red zone. Just recently, an assassin trying to get at Ong penetrated the inner compound—allegedly on behalf of cops across the street at Crame. Corpus has therefore ordered that Ong be guarded round the clock by commandos who specialize in liquidating terrorists.
Two of these grim killers are on duty in the safe house with Mary and me, and, needless to say, I move very slowly under their gaze as I stand up, reach across the kitchen table for my briefcase and take out some photos. I’ve told Ong over the phone that I wanted to hear about her dozen years as a 14K Tai Ka Tse—a “Big Sister”—and her seven years as a PNP and Hong Kong police agent. Now I reveal that my broad interest in her career has a bull’s-eye. “Have you ever run across this fellow?” I ask, feeling a weariness that has more to do with the passing years than jet lag. After all, Steven has just turned 39 and I, God help me, am 53. “I’m asking because the Canadian police—”
“I know him.”
“You know him?”
Ong presses her hand against the yellow buttons of her black silk cheongsam as she leans forward, her almond eyes narrowing at Steve’s 1992 photo. “You want to know his connection? This Steven is the mat’sai of Chong Yuk-sui, he is a 14K boss in Hong Kong.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. This Steven is supplying—” She looks up at me from the photos. “You better know who you are up against.”
I sit down—as slowly as I stood up. “How do you know him?”
“I investigated him from late 1994 to the middle of 1996. The investigation was called Viking. He was the subject. Steven Wong was our subject.”
Late 1994. That would have been after the DOJ screwed up Steve’s arrest and he fled Macau. So he fled back here. “We heard in Canada he had an alias,” I say. “Joe Co—”
“Joe Co?” she asks, looking startled, then points to herself. “I entrapped Joey Co for Ping Lacson. The PNP shot him July 1994.” She thinks on that a minute, then smiles in apparent memory of the scamming Steve. “You know what, I think probably when Steven comes here he would hear that name and use it for outside. But Chong Yuk-sui calls him Steven Wong, everybody in the 14K know him as Steven Wong.” She looks down again, moves her teardrop face back and forth between pictures. “This is the same Canadian. Fat, short, I saw these tattoos on him.”
I can feel the upward flight of birds in my belly that occurs whenever I think I’m getting close. “Did you see him recently?” I ask. “Like, within a month?”
“No, no, sometime 1997 the last time,” she says, and my birds stop climbing. “It was after Viking, because there were no arrests and I went to other cases. My assignment was to entrap Steven, so I introduce him 1994 to a wealthy smuggler in Makati, Consolacion Figueroa Coo, I used to work with her when I laundered money. Steven became her main supplier of drugs to the U.S.A. and Canada.” Ong takes my pad and block prints the Makati smuggler’s lyrical name. “Figueroa Coo worked with a big political family in Cavite. Now she is old and sick—I don’t know, maybe she still talk with Steven. But the family you should be very afraid because Cavite is the killing fields of the Philippines.”
I lean across the table into her personal space and tap the pad. “Mary, can you get in touch with Coo and find out if she knows where he is now?”
“Not possible, because this family is very close to Ping Lacson also,” Mary replies flatly, looking me in the eye so I will appreciate the significance of the connection. “Ping is from Cavite. And Ping was in charge of Viking. So no arrests, even when Steven was at the house of Coo with drugs when I went to visit.” She draws back, traces an arrow down from Figueroa Coo’s name and writes in three others, then hands my pad back. “The PNP seize my computer files; I will see what I have in my old notes for you.”
She crosses the room and drags a couple of cartons out from under a table and across the linoleum. While she digs through the strata of her investigations, I look at my pad’s newly inscribed names and arrows, which indicate only two degrees of separation between Steve and Ping:
Steven Wong → Figueroa Coo → three Cavite bigwigs → Ping Lacson
I should be flabbergasted, but I accept the connection with barely a shrug. A month after my visit to Steve’s unmarked grave in the Garden of Reflection I watched the Senate hearings over the Internet, and since then I’ve doubted whether it was ever Ping’s intention to hand the Paper Fan over to me—at least alive. During the hearings, Army Intelligence Chief Corpus produced phone records that showed Ping had for years been using the cell phone of a man Corpus said was Manila’s 14K dragon head, a multimillionaire restaurant owner named Kamsin “Kim” Wong. That forced Senator Lacson, who refused to testify at the inquiry, to nonchalantly tell the press that “a legitimate businessman named Kim Wong” had loaned him a cell phone, but it was “not the same Kim Wong” that Corpus claimed. Subpoenaed to testify, Kamsin “Kim” Wong contradicted Lacson, admitting that he had loaned his wife’s cell phone to Ping when Ping became PNP chief and that he was still paying the monthly bills, although, he said, he had no Triad involvements. Weighing the testimony of Corpus and others on Kim Wong’s affiliations, Report No. 66 recommended a criminal investigation of Lacson “for using a cell phone whose bills were paid for by Mr. Wong and/or his wife, as admitted by Mr. Wong.”
I look over at Mary Ong, now girlishly animated as, crouched on her knees, she tosses file folders every which way. Done up in her usual interview attire, she’s a hard lady not to watch. Ong is a celebrity in the Philippines, partly because during her testimony the beautiful police agent wore high-slit cheongsam dresses, crimson lipstick, and geisha-girl face powder that whitened her lineless complexion. Indeed, after the press observed her first performance in the staid chambers, they dispatched stories that read like movie star columns: “Mary Ong, a.k.a. Agent Rosebud, is everything one imagines a spy to be—sexy, glamorous, smart and foxy. And of course, fashionable.”
Her glamour aside, the big question in my mind is whether I can trust her. Mary Ong, BA, MBA, spent the years 1979 to 1991 laundering billions in Chinese underworld cash, as well as running guns to 14K gangsters in Macau’s Lisboa Hotel. A courier working for her was murdered and she wound up in jail for a year on drug-trafficking charges—although the charges were later dismissed after the city cops who arrested her were killed in a shoot-out with the PNP’s Reynaldo Berroya. (“The policemen who arrested me were drug traffickers themselves,” she told me. “They tried to set me up for the wrong racket. I was a money launderer, not a drug trafficker.”) In 1993, while the drug charges were still hanging over her head, the crime fighter Ping Lacson personally recruited her as “a PNP asset,” eventually assigning her the code name Rosebud. For the rest of the ’90s Mary “Rosebud” Ong worked undercover for the various anti-crime units Ping headed, stinging 14K drug lords for up to $40,000 a pop. Her stratospheric fees (she later revealed) came from the PNP’s partnerships with the biggest Triad members, who wanted to get rid of the competition, as well as from seized and resold shabu, criminals tortured to disclose the whereabouts of their drugs, and criminals kidnapped and held for ransom in a vacant town house that Rosebud owned on Roxas Boulevard.
In other words, Ong has a frighteningly unsavory past, but I consider it somewhat reassuring that, without any threat of prosecution, she stepped forward and tried to put a stop to all of it—an act for which she’s paid a life-altering price. Rosebud’s safe house (in which she could very likely spend the rest of her days) is a far cry from the marble-and-mirror mansion she once inhabited two blocks from Erap’s home in North Greenhills. It’s little more than a barracks coop, meant for four soldiers but now housing nine people. Lit by unshaded fluorescent tubes that highlight rusted venetian blinds and water-stained walls, it’s furnished with army bunk beds, a junkyard couch, and plastic boxes for Rosebud’s wardrobe. At night, Ong, her two teenage sons, her brother, her mother, her bodyguards, and a female caretaker/bodyguard sleep on the couch, the floor and in the bunks, all of them sharing a three-foot-by-three-foot bathroom with no shower. The safe house is made even more cramped by a hospital bed in the middle of the room on which her skeletal father lies wheezing and dying of cancer.
“Steven Wong had very good connections to Japan,” Mary says, now sitting sidesaddle on the floor and glancing over an old sheet she’s discovered. “He was traveling there all the time. I know he had a business of his own in Japan.”
“That matches what we know,” I tell her, getting excited all over again. “I found that out after my last trip. We heard it was a pachinko franchise,” I add, referring to the multibillion-dollar gambling game dominated by Yakuza, the crime group that has colluded with every Japanese administration since the war. During the Senate hearings, Intelligence Chief Corpus claimed there was a “tie-up” between Yakuza and Kamsin Wong’s 14K, and so I routed myself through Tokyo on this trip. Unfortunately, as with all my visits to Asia save one, I inhaled a lot of cigarette smoke in crowded environs but ran across no five-foot-four-inch Chinese-Canadian with bad vision.
“I remember Steven was a big gambler himself, here, Hong Kong, Macau—probably everywhere he went,” Mary says, “so pachinko, I can see it. Also shabu is very big in Japan, and Yakuza controls that. So that is another reason for him to go back and forth. But Manila was his home, here he had his own gang of Chinese boys.”
Exactly the same MO, then: a Triad who was chieftain of his own juvenile army, liked to travel, and had his hand in a few pies. By 1997, nothing had changed. I look at my notes. “I never heard of this boss Chong Yuk-sui. I thought his boss’s name was Eddy Wong.”
“Maybe he’s another, too, because Steven was only in the middle of the Triad. There were many people above him. I know Chong is still in Hong Kong, he trained Steven in the beginning, 1988, then he made him his mat’-sai—it means horse.” She turns a page. “Steven had another partner in Hong Kong named Lau, he was known as ‘Sai Wah.’ He travels to Canada all the time on a British passport, not a Hong Kong passport.” She reads off three of Steve’s other partners in the drug trade—Lai Tak-sang, Sy Ching-po, and Cheng Chi-man, adding, “They use Coo’s connection to the Cavite family that is close to Ping. But Ping stayed back to protect himself. The one who was dealing directly with everyone was Campos.”
That is, the PNP’s main informant-handler, Senior Superintendent John Campos—a handsome drug cop a decade Ong’s junior with whom she lived for five years. As Jerome Tang explained to me on my last trip, the affiliation gave Lacson’s men a hook on which to hang an attack on Ong’s credibility. Police Director Reynaldo Acop, the number two man in the PNP and one of those Ong accused of kidnapping and drug trafficking, alleged in the Senate that Rosebud was “a woman scorned,” out to “take her vengeance.” Mary Ong angrily countered that it was she who had initiated the breakup with Campos, and that what made her go public was not vengeance but the sight of Campos torturing kidnap victims in her town house on Roxas. In the end, weighing Ong’s motives against the documentary evidence she presented, the Senate ruled in favor of her credibility.*
Currently, Ong is claiming that her righteous motives for blowing the whistle on the PNP have been cruelly proven by events. Phone records at the Intelligence Service show that late on the night of December 4, 2002, there was a flurry of calls between Campos and Ong. Ong says Campos told her that Lacson had ordered her murdered and that he wanted to turn on his boss. She instructed Campos to come right over to the intelligence compound and put himself under the protection of Victor Corpus. But Campos never made it to the compound. At 12:45 A.M. he was shot dead while having a bite in an open-air eatery in Paranque, a town between Manila and Cavite. Witnesses said the shooters pulled up in a car, waited until the cop’s back was turned, then pumped bullets into his midriff and head. A month after that, on January 7, 2003, PNP Senior Superintendent Teofila Vina, a main suspect in the Bubby Dacer killing, was shot dead in Cavite. During the investigation the NBI revealed they had discovered a list of nine people who were in line to be liquidated: Vina, who reported directly to Lacson at the time of Dacer’s murder, was on the list. So was Mary Ong.
“Was Steven connected with the NBI?” I ask Mary as she returns to the table with an armload of files. “He was supposed to be a Confidential Agent.”
Rosebud waves her scarlet fingernails contemptuously. “It is nothing for you to be a CA. Many Triads like Steven become a CA. It’s not so official, you can buy an ID card that says you are a CA. If you are known by the NBI, they would only demand cooperation not to ruin your game. Then you are their asset. You should speak to General Wycoco,” she advises me. “He will tell you what the CAs have done to the reputation of the NBI.”
A couple of hours later Rosebud invites me to stay for a steak dinner, and, after a dessert of M&Ms, decides to take advantage of my visit. She gets permission from Corpus to leave the base for the evening—something she has not done for weeks. She dolls up in a pink cheongsam and, at nine, protected by six armed guards, we drive in a bulletproof van across town to the glitzy Heritage Hotel and Casino, on the corner of Roxas and Edsa, not far from where the floating Jumbo is slowly falling to pieces. She has some people she wants me to meet who can help with my hunt—a hunt she sees as serving a larger goal. For if Steve can be found and arrested, he might be persuaded to corroborate her allegation that Figueroa Coo, the prominent family in Cavite Province, and Panfilo Lacson all worked together during Project Viking, profiting from the multimillion-dollar drug deals she helped arrange.
“That is what she’ll say and then for a change she’ll point to me,” Lacson tells me the next day in his Senate office, as soon as I mention that Mary Ong has identified Steve. He gazes down at Steve’s wanted poster that I just printed off Interpol’s website, then looks up and shares a laugh with his executive assistant, Jerome Tang. Ping turns back to me, still chuckling. “When I inquired about him I found out he was really killed. Of course, you won’t believe it.”
“No, because it was all fraudulent,” I say, thinking, Why are you suddenly telling me this now and not at any time in the last twenty months? “The PNP investigation was part of the scam,” I remind him. “Any inquiry made with them will show he’s dead.”
Ping shrugs, reaches for his cell phone, punches in a code and begins talking in Tagalog, staring vacantly at his uniformed portrait to the right of his senator’s desk. I hear him say the words “Steven Wong,” and then “Lik Man.” While Ping turns to write notes on the Interpol sheet, I size up his silver suit and silver watch. He looks far more spiffy and confident than the last time I saw him, projecting a polished air that’s congruent with his presidential ambitions. On November 15, he became the first candidate to announce he was in the running. Six weeks later, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared she would not be seeking re-election, ostensibly because she was “told by God” to govern the remainder of her term “freed of politics”—although Lacson views her announcement as a cynical ploy to get him off her case until she finds the right moment to reenter the race.
Since walking through the Senate doors in July 2001, he’s been hammering Arroyo as one scandal after another has blotted out the yellow glow of her EDSA II days, sending her poll figures into a nosedive. The two most serious scandals have involved the now-deported Mark Jimenez: the first one ensnared Justice Secretary Nani Perez, whom Arroyo fired after evidence surfaced suggesting that he had allegedly extorted $2 million in bribes from Jimenez; the second concerned Arroyo’s husband, Mike, who is the subject of a Senate investigation (initiated by Lacson’s party) for accepting millions of dollars from Jimenez when Gloria was vice president.*
On most other fronts under her watch the Philippines gives every sign (once again) of being on the verge of collapse—a state of affairs from which Lacson has also been making considerable political hay. Eighty-seven people were killed in the weeks that led up to last summer’s barangay elections. In the jungles of the archipelago, pitched battles rage between an alphabet soup of rebel armies and government forces, but the government does not appear to be winning its newly named War on Terrorism, even with the help of a battalion of American advisers and their hardware. Since my last visit, scores of Philippine soldiers have fallen in combat and almost every day sees headlines like “MILF counterattacks; 16 gov’t soldiers dead,” and “NPA hit squads target gov’t officials.” In Mindanao’s cities, 10 terrorist blasts set by Islamic rebels have killed 70 civilians and wounded over 400. In Manila, the embassies of Canada, Australia, and the European Union were recently closed for a week after a terrorist bus bomb killed or severely wounded two dozen civilians and information surfaced that the embassies would be next. Travel warnings from foreign capitals come and go with frightening frequency, the national debt has ballooned to a historic high, the peso is near its historic low, and organized crime now accounts for between 10 and 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. On top of all this, the Philippines is the regular recipient of bad marks from overseas watchdog organizations. Amnesty International has just released a report stating that torture by the police is rampant, and the U.S. Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has released another report stating that the country is a drug smugglers’ paradise. Of particular concern to me, three more journalists have been murdered in the last eight months, allegedly on the orders of the politicians they had exposed. To date, naturally, no one has been charged, leading the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism to banner on its website the judgment of the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists: “Despite its free and lively press, or perhaps because of it, the Philippines is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists.”
Meanwhile, Lacson has promised to end the chaos. He’s just told the Far Eastern Economic Review that if elected president he will “take on the criminals and terrorists who are tainting the Philippines’ image overseas and hurting its economy.” Aside from declaring that he “would rather be feared than loved,” he didn’t say exactly how he would restore order, although so many influential Filipinos believe he is the strongman for the job that the People’s Power Coalition is scrambling for a candidate who can beat him.* It’s frequently mentioned in the free and lively press that some of the current leaders of the PPC are worried for their safety if he is the next president.
Ping now signs off, pushes the Interpol sheet aside and contemplates a Senate memo on his desk. I wait, but he doesn’t tell me what he’s found out about Steve. He looks as if he’s lost interest in the subject.
“She recognized his tattoos,” I tell him. “She said right away, he’s short, he’s fat.”
“And she was exactly right,” he mumbles without inflection, writing on a pad. “Anyway, go ahead. I must write the opening prayer of the Senate. Because every day, three times a week, before we open session, there’s a prayer, alternated of course by different senators.”
“She said Steve was active in the Philippines right up to 1997,” I explain. “And she said he was the main supplier to Figueroa Coo here in Manila. She says you would know Figueroa.”
That detaches his interest from the prayer. “Figueroa? She’s a dealer of commissary goods. In Makati. She was a known smuggler way way back.”
“That’s right, in Makati, very well connected to some other people she says you know.” I bring up Ong’s allegation that Coo was connected to the three figures in the Cavite family—but Ping says that’s ridiculous, they are all upstanding figures in politics, and have never been accused of a crime—except by political enemies.
“You waste your time talking Mary Ong,” Jerome snorts beside me. “She take him to Heritage Casino,” he tells Ping. “Introduce him to her friends there.”
Lacson bursts into laughter, adding that they must have offered me some very “colorful” stories about him—which I don’t deny. The glum group of ex-undercover agents and businessmen filled the casino’s coffee shop with dark vignettes. An East Indian named Danny Devnani told me he used to be Estrada’s bagman, collecting ransom from the families of men kidnapped by Ping’s PNP. He looked at Steve’s face and said: “If you get this guy, he will maybe point to Ping for a lot of things. I will put the word around.”
Ping dismisses them as kooks and criminals. “Terry, these people will broadcast any lie, and then when someone repeats the lie to them, they say, ‘Oh, see, he knows it too, so I was correct.’”
“What about the Senate report?” I ask. “They quote it like the Bible.”
Ping explains that his colleagues decided to shelve Report No. 66 until a parliamentary question he raised could be debated: the report was endorsed by two of the investigating committees, but the third committee’s vote was tied. I’m aware, though, that the report’s seemingly infinite shelving has another dimension. The powerful senator who arranges the Senate’s calendar of debate, and who handed down the ruling in favor of shelving Report 66, is none other than Loren Legarda—who has shocked the nation by approaching Ping with a request to be his vice presidential running mate in the 2004 election.
“Who else will you be seeing?” Jerome asks me.
“Wycoco’s one,” I reply.
“I have just received a text message on him,” Lacson says. “They are supposed to be sending him to be an ambassador to Libya. The administration thinks he has failed in his mission.”
“What’s his mission?”
“To put me in jail.”
With her platoon of bodyguards in tow, Mary Ong and her lawyer meet me at NBI headquarters to swear a 15-point affidavit (see Appendix) that details her dealings with Steven Wong. Her lawyer, Leonard de Vera, a former spokesman of the Philippine Bar Association and the first to launch a private prosecution against Erap for corruption, could have certified Ong’s affidavit in his office. But Mary suggested to me this morning that the NBI’s notarization of the public document would send a dramatic message to Steve. Since our meeting she has made some calls and received information there was a Chinese-Canadian behind a large shabu operation that was busted two and a half years ago. Her sources were vague about the description of the Canadian but, in a month, she says, she will meet Sandra Lim, a woman convicted in the shabu bust, and find out more for me and the NBI. March 11 is the woman’s sentencing. “If your informers say he is here sometime 2000, then maybe that was him.”
We head for the office of Superintendent Auralyn L. Pascual, the chief of the NBI Academy and an attorney who has a notarization seal at the ready. After Mary swears her oath, presses her thumbprint on five copies of the affidavit and signs each, a dozen agents and secretaries watching from the door crowd in to meet the witness the Inquirer has dubbed “the thorn in Lacson’s side.” The women ask her where she buys her gorgeous cheongsams and the men ask how her movie deal is going. (Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks gave her a call over Christmas, and Ong now has a Hollywood agent working out the details—a flashy development in her saga that has made front-page news in the Philippines.) We take half a dozen group photos for as many cameras and then Ong pulls me upstairs to Wycoco’s office for a conference on Steve, Ping, Figueroa Coo, and the Cavite family.
“You’re sure he’s not in a meeting?” I ask as we breeze by two sets of secretaries.
“For such a matter the director’s door is open,” she says.
Her lawyer, de Vera, a cherubic fellow my age with a very kind face, holds his hands up helplessly. “We follow the boss.”
This is my second encounter with the director on this trip. In the first, yesterday, I showed up alone and presented Wycoco with the rumor that he was on his way to Libya.
“We were able to trace the source of the intrigue,” he told me. “Somebody out there is trying to destabilize us. Actually, it has something to do with a senator who is planning to become president of this country.”
“The senator who is planning to become president also says you told the DEA that all the charges against him are politically motivated.”
“He says that to a reporter?” Wycoco inhaled deeply and let the air out slowly, regaining his rarely lost composure. “Terry, do you think I would be that careless to say something like that?”
“Not really.”
“That man can look you in the eye and he can lie and you will not know that he is lying. I have known him from the Philippine Military Academy, I was three classes above him. If I knew Lacson to be a good guy I would not say anything against him. But I know different. We are expecting any day that the Supreme Court will decide on the Kuratong Baleleng case. If they rule in favor of the law it will finally be sent to trial, he will be arrested for nonbailable multiple murder and for stealing two million dollars from the gang.”
“He says he’s confident they’ll rule in his favor.”
“Of course he will say so. Ping Lacson has a criminal mind. He believes judges share his mind-set.”
“Speaking of criminals,” I said, and related Mary’s information that Lacson was a friend of the big political family in Cavite.
“Yes, that’s true. I know the family, they are crooks. Have you heard of Kim Wong?”
“His picture’s on my wall.”
Warmed up on the subject of Ping, I reminded Wycoco why I’d returned to Manila. “We met with Moises Tamayo and some other guy—I think he was Moises’s CA. We discussed this fellow.”
Wycoco opened the folder I handed him, studied Steve’s Interpol sheet, then gazed pensively across the table to a portrait of Arroyo superimposed over a cheering crowd at EDSA II. “If I can remember, Moises made an inquiry with his asset and gave the information to our Interpol chief, Ricardo Diaz. But—” he tapped the pages of my nine-year-old Saturday Night article “—I don’t believe anything came of the inquiry.”
Knowing what I did about the NBI’s “assets,” I hadn’t expected any exhilarating leads to have proceeded from the inquiry. “Maybe something will come of some new information I have for you,” I told him, adding that I was on the last chapter of my book, trying to get some wheels in motion so the Paper Fan would be bagged on the last page, so to speak. “Mary Ong tells me she investigated Steven for Ping between 1994 and 1996. She could have entrapped him but there were no arrests because she said Ping had connections to a woman named Figueroa Coo through his contacts in Cavite. So when I mentioned Mary Ong to Ping and that she had investigated Steve, Ping immediately said, ‘When I inquired about him I found out he was really killed.’ But he’s changed his tune from 2001. He knows very well the PNP were active in helping Steven stage his death, he knows that all the reports are fraudulent.”
All of this seemed to sharply focus Wycoco on the reason I was here. He opened a pad and began rapidly writing notes on what I’d just said. “This makes me most interested in finding out what are this Steven Wong’s affiliates,” he said. “Please continue.”
And so, with no mean-eyed CA looking on this time, I told him Steve’s Joe Co alias and that he was supposed to have been a CA himself. Far from being defensive, Wycoco delighted me by calling in his secretary and asking her to run a search on all Confidential Agents in the computer. While she was gone, as Mary predicted, Wycoco wearily admitted that the official roster of 5,000 CAs was ridden with Chinese criminals and that these CAs had tainted the once-stellar reputation of the NBI. The subagent system had been instituted long before his watch, he said, referring to the tenure of an NBI director named Alfredo Lim, who’d retired from the NBI just before my 1993 trip to the Philippines.
The secretary came back with three names, one Co, one Koh, and one Wong, but in two cases the CAs weren’t sworn until 2001, and, in the third case, Wycoco knew the CA personally, and he was clean. But, Wycoco shrugged helplessly, the information was not definitive, since so many Triad members had for years been parading around the city as CAs, having been unofficially appointed to the fold. “It is possible this Steven Wong befriended one of our agents, maybe treated him to a nice car, maybe gave him something, and then he became an asset to the NBI.”
In any case, Steven “Joe Co” Wong, or whatever alias he’d used, would now be long gone from any affiliation with the NBI, in Manila at least. On July 31, Wycoco said, he had fired the capital’s 500 CAs—although he admitted that still left thousands of others around the country, without whom the cash-strapped NBI couldn’t operate, since they could afford so few full agents in the provinces.
Wycoco looked down at the tabletop miserably; out of courtesy I didn’t bring up the news that the CAs were causing him endless grief. On December 13, on the resort island of Cebu, an estimated 15 CAs had put 73 bullets into a car filled with innocent civilians. “How could something like this happen?” the Daily Inquirer asked in an editorial. “Instead of enlightening or reassuring the public, Wycoco’s explanation is both disturbing and frightening.” From Wycoco’s explanation, the Inquirer concluded that the NBI had criminal cowboys running around the provinces, out of the control of their chief and “with murder in their minds.” Only five of the CAs had been identified by the NBI, “leading to the suspicion that the NBI is trying to spare some sacred cows among its confidential agents who had a hand in the near-massacre.”
Ong’s lawyer, however, doubted the NBI chief was trying to spare anyone; rather, Leonard de Vera told me, Wycoco was in charge of a polluted organization fully capable of resisting his efforts to clean it up. “That he has corrupt people around him, I have no doubt about it.”
Mary, de Vera, and I now enter Wycoco’s office and take our seats at his conference table. Soon we’re sharing colorful tales of Figueroa Coo, the Cavite family, Steve, and Lacson. Wycoco hands me a Daily Inquirer column by a journalist named Ramon Tulfo, a long-time foe of Lacson who alleges that Ping threw two innocent women out of a helicopter to punish their gangster relative, and ordered the execution of a seven-year-old witness to a PNP murder. While I’m reading this column with my mouth open, the chief scans Rosebud’s affidavit. He fixes his eyes on Point 12, which mentions the “prominent political family in Cavite.” He’s disappointed the Cavite figures are not in there by name.
De Vera explains that Ong is already being sued by Lacson for accusing the senator of killing John Campos in an emotional radio interview hours after the assassination, and she doesn’t need another lawsuit filed by Cavite millionaires. Catch Wong, de Vera says, and let him be the one to name names. He says he’s working pro bono for Mary, and more and more of his practice is being monopolized by her private prosecutions of Lacson and his many subordinates. In the criminal courts, the cases are predictably stalled by the legal maneuvers of their chief counsel, a former solicitor general who also represents Kamsin Wong and Joseph Estrada. Other cases are wending their way through the Internal Affairs hearings of the PNP, with Ong the star witness in all. In fact, de Vera’s own life is under threat because of the private prosecutions, and he too must travel with bodyguards.
“I think you should stay away from Cavite yourself,” Wycoco advises me. “Too dangerous for you to go there to question them about this guy.” Instead, he says, I’d be better off to safely invest my time getting the Canadian embassy to cooperate with the NBI, perhaps helping him to procure the RCMP file on the Paper Fan. It seems the problems afflicting the PNP’s liaison with the embassy afflict the NBI, too. The embassy won’t cooperate with Wycoco, even on his investigation of Ping Lacson for allegedly transferring a large sum of undeclared money to a Vancouver bank. “I have no one in the embassy who will talk to me,” he says.
“I’ll get you an intelligence agent,” I promise him.
Before heading over to the embassy, I decide to fill my notebook with some ammunition that will get me through the door for a discussion with the promised intelligence agent. I stop off on Recto Street opposite the Isetan mall to see what has become of the false-identity trade since I informed the NBI of it in May 2001. The new Metrorail has been extended from Mendiola through the neighborhood, and half of Recto Street is now replaced by 60-foot stanchions and an elevated line. But the other half is still doing a brisk business—with one difference. The crowded arcade booths are now peppered with male and female Muslim customers from Quiapo, most wearing distinctive head scarves. As before, there is no attempt to conceal what is going on, and I am offered business cards from booth owners openly offering deals on Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand passports. The icy question in my mind is: Why hasn’t the NBI done anything about this since the last time I was here? Don’t they know there’s a war on terrorism going on?
“They probably get their cut,” Martin Tremblay tells me in his office, just down the hall from his boss, Ambassador Robert Collette. Tremblay looks and acts the part of a spook. He’s trim, handsome, and in shirtsleeves, with an arch Quebecois manner that I presume helps him keep his wits operating on the Philippine side of the looking glass. He says he is thoroughly familiar with Recto Street, as is every cabdriver and street cop in town. So what, he wonders sarcastically, was the NBI doing pretending that Recto Street was news to them in 2001?
“They [the Recto Street criminals] even advertise in the papers here,” he says. “I’ve done an investigation.” He gets up and opens a folder. “Buy-and-sell advertisement,” he says. “Just one day in the paper. March 19, 2002. Open, leading newspaper, you just call the number, they provide you with a bank certificate for three hundred thousand pesos. Here—” He takes down a stack of false documents procured by prospective immigrants on Recto Street and plops them on his desk with a clap. “Documents all fake, we seized them at the window. Income tax, passbooks, letters of employment, business registration, ID cards, birth certificates. Openly done and with total impunity. We’re well aware of what’s going on.”
“I was actually hoping I wouldn’t be telling you anything new,” I say. “It would be pretty scary if you guys were in the dark.”
“We try not to be,” he replies patiently.
Moving right along, I unzip my briefcase. “Let me tell you about another matter I’m dealing with the NBI on. I don’t think you know about this guy, he’s a 14K Triad from Vancouver….” I give him the pictures and the latest Interpol sheet, then unfold the tale, right up to Mary Ong’s affidavit, which I give him a copy of as well. “Now. General Wycoco would like a contact here at the embassy, so that he can deal directly with someone on this. He says he’s not been able to get a lot of cooperation from the embassy. I realize there’s probably a lot of reasons for that—”
I pause. He smiles.
“Go on,” he says.
“According to Mary Ong, there’s a good chance Steve is continuing to do his bad deeds out of the Philippines. That matches our information in Vancouver.”
“Mmmhmm,” he says, writing this down.
“Unfortunately, I have to be honest and tell you that at one time Steve was supposed to be connected to the NBI. They have this auxiliary Confidential Agent system?”
Again the patient face. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“They have about five thousand of them. But Wycoco says he’s gotten rid of the ones in Manila, so Steve’s probably cut loose, I don’t think he can call on any NBI guys anymore.”
“Maybe,” he smiles.
“Look Martin, Wycoco would like this guy, but for twelve years he’s—”
“Been well protected. Naturally.”
“So can Wycoco phone you? Can you take a call?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, begrudgingly. “I’ll take a call, I’ll take a call.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“I think he’s about the best there is here.”
He pulls that face again. “I’m sure.”
I wait, but he leaves it there. “Go ahead, you better tell me.”
“No no no, I cannot tell you anything about our relations with the NBI.”
“But it leads you to have some—questions? Can you just tell me that?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Because I’m putting my life in their hands at this point.”
“Here it’s hard to know who to trust and who not to trust,” Tremblay says. “In any organization, at any level.”
We’re quiet for a moment, looking each other in the eye.
“You know that,” he says.
“I know that.”
“So good luck on your investigation.”
Downstairs, beyond the three cordons of security, I make a note to question de Vera again about corrupt agents, but then scratch it out. I have no time to chase down a dozen more allegations on this trip. Like mud in March, there’s no bottom to them in this country.
Back in my hotel room, shoving chairs against the door for the night, I tell myself that if I wanted to find a soul with no allegations against him I would have spent the last decade looking for snow leopards. This is Steve’s world, after all, and in the nations where he’s found refuge, almost every name worth mentioning has at least some taint to it. The worst kill or torture, steal or extort megamillions, throw women out of helicopters or douse them with acid. Just open a paper, on any given day, and read the headlines.
In Cambodia, King Norodom Sihanouk has just postponed a trip to China “because the political situation in our country has intensified.” He’s referring to a day of rioting and looting in the capital; to journalists arrested; to the murder of a prominent Funcinpec adviser; to threats of criminal prosecution against one of Funcinpec’s leaders; and to a war with Thailand that was only narrowly avoided. The international press is laying this latest Khmer anguish at the feet of Prime Minister Hun Sen. There’s a national election coming up this summer, always a harbinger of dangerous doings in Cambodia. Twenty people were killed in last year’s provincial elections, yet Funcinpec and Sam Rainsy’s party managed to make gains, causing a flowering of hope in the international community: Cambodia seemed to be proceeding on its incremental transition to democracy. Then, on January 29, 2003, the day before I left for the Philippines, all hell broke loose. Hun Sen’s political opponents are now accusing the PM of engineering the chaos and the attendant repression to ensure he wins the national ballot. All of it bears witness to what journalist Phelim Kyne presciently told me in 1999: “If you look at the last ten years, every time they’ve been building to a boom, something happens.”
The immediate cause of the intensified “political situation” is deftly phrased by the CanWest news organization’s Asia hand, Jonathan Manthorpe. “Hun Sen is sexually over-engined like many powerful political men and has a special taste for actresses,” he writes from Phnom Penh. “A few months ago, according to sources at the highest levels of Cambodia’s establishment, Hun Sen met and was smitten by popular Thai soap opera actress Suvanant Kongying.” The one-eyed PM invited Suvanant to visit the Kingdom, but, possibly aware of the fate of the last star Hun Sen had reportedly had an affair with, Suvanant rejected the PM’s invitation, and was then misquoted in a Khmer tabloid as saying she’d never visit the country until Angkor Wat became part of Thailand. Angered, Hun Sen gave credence to the falsely reported insult by declaring that Suvanant was “not worth the grass that grows at Angkor.”
Egged on by his implication that the country’s honor had been defaced, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Thai embassy. The protesters were well behaved until they were joined by a gang of CPP-backed militia called the Pagoda Boys. Led by these paramilitary goons, the mob broke into the embassy, ransacked and then torched the place, forcing 10 Thai diplomats to flee for their lives over the back wall. The Thai ambassador phoned the Cambodian authorities for help, but they would not act against the Pagoda Boys except on the orders of Hun Sen, who was out of touch “playing golf.” The Pagoda Boys then led the mob in an overnight rampage through the capital, burning three Thai-owned hotels and a score of businesses, one of which, a cell phone company, belonged to the Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin mobilized the Thai army and prepared to invade to protect his country’s interests. Finally, on the morning of January 30, the police were called out, although they merely watched as more Thai hotels were looted. The damage to Thai property from the riots was eventually estimated at $46.5 million, including $6.9 million at the gutted Thai embassy.
Hun Sen’s reaction to the violence was typical of the strongman. He ordered the arrest of a radio-station owner and a Khmer-language newspaper editor, both of whom he accused of inciting the riots by airing rumors that revenge attacks against Cambodians were taking place in Bangkok. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemned the arrests: “Attempts to silence free speech and opinion do not bode well for free and fair elections later this year,” they stated in a joint declaration, published in the Washington Post. One of the leaders of the Funcinpec Party, the king’s half-sister Princess Norodom Vacheara, also took the arrests as a bad sign. She accused Hun Sen of trying to intimidate the press in advance of the summer’s election, and demanded that the radio-station owner and the editor be immediately freed. Hun Sen allegedly called her “just a common girl,” she threatened to sue him for slander, and Hun Sen charged her with criminal defamation. A few days later a message was sent to Funcinpec in the typical Cambodian manner: Om Radasay, senior political adviser to both the princess and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was murdered in broad daylight as he left a Phnom Penh restaurant with two Funcinpec members. CPP officials said it was nothing more than a cell phone robbery, but witnesses to the killing said the “thief” interrogated the three diners until he had determined the identity of Om, then sadistically shot him through the groin. The shooter hopped on a waiting moto to make his getaway and, only then, the witnesses said, did the driver order the assassin to go back and grab the writhing Om’s phone.
At Om’s funeral Ranariddh declared that the killing was a political assassination designed to intimidate Funcinpec at the start of campaigning. “He had no enemies and was not involved in any affairs. He was a poor man and as gentle as a monk, so the only thing is a political crime.” Hun Sen denied any political link. “I do not think this had a political motive,” he told reporters. “We must find and arrest the criminals. We must not jump to any premature conclusions.”
The riots (and their cause) shook confidence in Hun Sen, and it was rumored that an alternative to the PM was being considered by honchos in the CPP. The CPP politico most favored was Phnom Penh’s popular governor, Chea Sophara, who bears the credit for preserving the capital’s lovely ambience as it has modernized in the last couple of years and become a tourist destination. Hun Sen appears to have gotten wind of the threat to his reign, because he ordered Chea transferred to Burma as ambassador, where, as Manthorpe dryly notes, “The military regime can be trusted to thwart Chea’s penchant for publicity.”*
Not long after the burning and looting in Phnom Penh, Manila catches fire too—literally. The fires rage in the squatter slums of Tondo, Quezon City, and Paranque. From Roxas Boulevard I watch black cumulus clouds boiling up like nuclear mushrooms, then spreading out to obscure the bay and choke citizens in places as far away as Corregidor and Bataan. Thousands of shanty homes are destroyed and blocks of warehouses and factories collapse into cinders as the fires move about the town, dying down in one area and flaring up in another. The Daily Inquirer discovers why it is so difficult to put the fires out. “Metro Manila Has Only Half of Fire Trucks It Needs”—this despite the pork development funds awarded every year to buy the trucks.
“I liken the Philippines to a boat with many holes,” Leonard de Vera tells me in his Makati office while Manila burns. “This boat is sinking with eighty million people aboard, and we are far from shore. The holes are terrorists, crime, drugs, overpopulation, poverty, pollution, and the depletion of our natural resources. But the worst hole is the culture of corruption that allows these holes to widen and go unfilled.”
“Why don’t you run for president and fix the holes?” I ask him.
De Vera, who I’ve noticed wears a perpetually bemused smile even when battling the PNP’s lawyers in court, now bursts into open laughter. “My own friends want me to join the government. I have said: ‘Why should I join the government when I have a lucrative practice and I would earn not even one thousand dollars a month?’ You know what they say, my honest friends? ‘The salary is low but the income is high.’”
Kicking the smoldering ashes in Tondo, talking to some of the suddenly homeless masa who owned nothing to begin with and now, sitting in their underwear, own less than nothing, I contemplate the universal ipso facto of Steve’s world. For officials in every place where he has found refuge, the salary is low but the income is high, and therefore, no official is completely trustworthy, in any organization, at any level.
Down by the garbage-choked shore of Manila Bay I look northwest as a plane climbs through the smoke and smog. Who knows but that Steve might be winging his way to Macau on some mat’sai mission right now, or maybe he’s just going there to meet with new cohorts? Networker that he is, I’m sure he’s found out who’s on top in the Vegas of Asia. For Stanley Ho is not, having had his monopoly officially terminated by the Chinese on March 31, 2002. They’ve invited in the former owner of the Mirage, Steve Wynn, who is decorating the peninsula with his own weird tastes, leaving the 81-year-old Ho to shoot for double happiness on-line with DrH0888.com, an electronic casino that features the good doctor thumbs-up on the webpage beside a voluptuous, half-naked croupier, saying “Check this out.” In the Palm Plaza’s Internet café, I wind up giving his virtual sexpot-dealer a night’s rent.
Everybody who counts now has all the latest on Steve. I’ve sent thick packages to the RCMP Hong Kong Liaison Office and to Unit One, given them the phone numbers of Mary Ong, Martin Tremblay, Victor Corpus, and Reynaldo Wycoco. Out of cash, all I can do is go home and see if a fifth trip is worth another loan.
On the evening of March 11, I get an e-mail from Rosebud. She’s attended the sentencing of Sandra Lim. “Sandra Lim turned hysterical after she heard the verdict. Lucky for her because the judge was compassionate. With 247 kilos, death penalty must have been implemented. Instead, life imprisonment was what she got.”
What about Steve? I think, scrolling down the screen.
“She mentioned to me that her husband, a foreign Chinese national, was the one guilty with some cohorts. She mentioned her husband’s associates are Canadian Chinese. Another case, in a Valenzuela laboratory raid, also leads to a Canadian Chinese. A Mayor [named] Mitra was arrested with 503 kilos sometime Oct 2001 and another 350 kilos in Pangasinan weeks after. A Canadian Chinese name always popped out, nicknamed A-Tong (Chinese character ‘North’). Am just curious if this can be related in S Wong’s group. Without the Chinese characters and pictures, it is very very difficult to identify.”
“Dear Mary,” I write back. “Thank you for all this information. It’s possible Steven Wong brought some friends over and is now in the middle of these Canadian-Chinese associates. It would be great if you could ask Sandra Lim (or anyone else in the underworld) if they’ve come across a short, fat, 39-year-old Chinese who speaks English without an accent, and who could be Canadian…. Let me know if you come up with anything else.”
INBOX 3/12/03: “Dear Terry, I will try. I verified information with NBI agents Lasala and Rey Esmeralda. They confirmed that several laboratory raids led to a Chinese Canadian. NBI arrested Sandra Lim, wife of Michael Lim, but to my surprise, NBI do not even have a picture of Michael Lim! My source in the jail said Sandra is still being supported by Michael Lim, the [one] Sandra said is into drug trade with some other Chinese including a Canadian Chinese…. I will still try to get additional information for you. From, Mary Rosebud.”
I go downstairs and ask my wife if I should fly to the Philippines again and push at this latest lead.
“It would be cheaper if we just moved there,” she replies.
OUTBOX 3/12/03: “Mary, Thank you for your detailed updates. I wonder if NBI Agents Lasala and Esmeralda would know if the Chinese Canadian matched the description of Steven Wong: 5 foot four inches, 39 years old, etc. Terry.”
INBOX: 3/13/03: “Dear Terry, I am not sure if Lasala and Esmeralda know about S Wong. I asked them if they had reported to NBI Director Wycoco regarding the findings that several laboratory raids led and pinpointed to a Canadian Chinese. They said ‘No.’ I did not share info of S. Wong because Lasala and Narcotics Director Reynor Gonzales (Lacson appointed) are friends, good friends. Gonzales is a very close ally of Lacson. Anyway, I will tell Wycoco.”
OUTBOX 3/13/03: “Dear Mary, Yes, please tell Wycoco about any Chinese Canadians you hear of. I trust Wycoco, but the problem you phrase regarding the others is exactly the problem faced by the Canadian police, the Canadian Embassy, and myself. We are never sure who to trust when dealing with Philippine law enforcement. We never know who’ll betray us or make some money by tipping off the target…. Try and keep safe. Terry.”
INBOX 3/17/03: “Dear Terry, I will do my best to gather more informations regarding the Canadian Chinese partners that Sandra Lim mentioned. Definitely, I will not get the information from the NBI. I think Lasala and Esmeralda know more than just confirming that the several raids link and point to Canadian Chinese. They confirmed Canadian-Chinese links in two or three big drug laboratories but I don’t know why they stop pursuing. A relative of Sandra Lim said that he even brought money to Ping’s Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force office when Sandra’s condominium was raided in year 2000. It is so difficult for me to investigate at this point, not knowing who to trust. From, Mary Rosebud.”
Her last sentence drops me into a slough. Two weeks go by. I stare at the date. April Fools.
OUTBOX 4/1/03: “Dear Mary, I’m most interested in finding out if any of those Chinese Canadians are Steven Wong. If the police can arrest him, and get him to talk, that would open up an international story that Ping and his bunch might have to answer to directly. It’s my belief that international attention is one of the only hopes for justice in the Philippines. Thank you for all the time you spend on your e-mails. I really do appreciate them, as does my editor.”
My editor.
“Anne, I’m always almost there. Always almost.”
INBOX 4/1/03: “Dear Terry, You are right. Only international attention can bring hope for justice in the Philippines. Today, finally the Supreme Court has decided on Ping’s Kuratong Baleleng Case. And the decision is really ‘shock and awe’ to Ping! Please read Phil Inquirer, Mary.”
SUPREME COURT REVIVES MURDER RAP VS LACSON
SAYING the “state is entitled to justice,” the Supreme Court ordered Tuesday the reopening of cases of the alleged murder of suspected members of the Kuratong Baleleng kidnapping-for-ransom gang in 1995, including a multiple-murder case against Senator Panfilo Lacson, who was a police task force head at the time.
Voting 10 to four with one abstention, the high court directed Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 81 under Judge Theresa Yadao to “forthwith proceed with Criminal Cases Nos. 01–101102 to 01–101112 with deliberate dispatch.”
Lacson, who declared his intention to run for president next year, has 15 days to file a motion for reconsideration.
Leonard de Vera, one of the private lawyers working for the reopening of the cases, said the ruling allowed Yadao to issue a warrant for the senator’s arrest.
Multiple-murder carries the penalty of death, and is thus non-bailable.
Lacson said his lawyers would seek the tribunal’s reconsideration. “But as things stand now, there’s a very slim chance that our motion will be granted,” he said in a statement. Lacson described the tribunal’s ruling as “most lamentable….”
He added: “The decision of the high tribunal bodes ill for the rule of law in this country.”*
INBOX 4/1/03: “Dear Terry, I just had dinner with Prosecutor Solis, the prosecutor on Sandra Lim’s case involving 247 kilos of shabu. Fiscal Solis volunteered some information; he said that the drug lab cases and Sandra’s case lead to one pipeline that involved Canadian-Chinese connection. But he does not understand why investigators opted to stop pursuing the upper level of the case. I need to check this out. From, Mary Rosebud.”
Yes, check it out! By all means, check it out! Because it fits. It has always fit. With Steve, the pieces will always fall into place for me, except the one big piece. The Paper Fan himself. And I know why! The investigators always opt to stop pursuing the upper level of the case. Their salary is low but their income is high and you can’t trust anyone!
I do not hear from Mary for another two weeks, and then her e-mails come three-a-day, mostly about Lacson and other cases with more immediate rewards or threats to her. During this period, every morning, I do the homework she’s assigned me and read the Philippine Daily Inquirer, then click “Favorites,” go to Steve’s Interpol poster—there to just stare and mope.
On this morning, quite by accident, I click on the “Interpol and Fugitives” main page, and discover nothing less than my motive for flying in pursuit of him 10 years ago. I could have written it myself the day I reasoned that impunity for Steve was something I just couldn’t accept.
Fugitives in Context
One of the most important fields of activity of the global law enforcement community today is the apprehension of fugitives.
Fugitives, as a result of their criminal activity, pose a pervasive threat to public safety worldwide. Fugitives are mobile and opportunistic. They frequently finance their continued flight from the law by further criminal activities, which respect no traditional political or geographical boundaries.
Fugitives undermine the world’s criminal justice systems. They may have been charged with a violation of the law but not been arrested; they may have been released on bail and then fled to avoid prosecution [italics mine] or perhaps they have escaped from prison. When fugitives flee from their charges, cases are not adjudicated, convicted criminals fail to meet their obligations, and crime victims are denied justice. If fugitives are not pursued by means of an aggressive investigation to locate them, it sends a subtle message to others that fleeing from the law or failing to comply with the law is somehow acceptable.
It’s not acceptable, and with such a call to arms just a mouse click from his face, I know I’ll never admit I can’t find Steven Wong. I swivel in my chair, get up and approach Kwan Kung, pronam, and light a candle. Theatrically shadowed, my red god looks back at me with loving outrage. His scholar’s left eye is wisdom. His general’s right eye is determination. “Every criminal has to have somebody on his case,” I whisper the good cop’s mantra. “For Steve, I’m that somebody. I may be closing this book, Kwan Kung, but not before I’ve let everyone know about the Paper Fan. I’m taking him with me into my unfunded retirement. I’ll die before I give Steve up for dead.”
*“Rosebud’s narration [is] full of details which by their nature could not have been the result of deliberate after-thought,” Committee Report No. 66 stated. “Though it may be said to have come from a polluted source, such testimony is acceptable as proof especially where it is supported and corroborated by other evidence, as is the case with Rosebud’s declarations. And while there are discrepancies in her narration, a number of which have been noted in the footnotes, they are inconsistencies in minor details which do not impair her credibility.”
*On August 1, 2003, Mark Jimenez pled guilty in the United States to three of the 47 counts against him. For two counts of tax evasion and one count of illegally contributing funds to the Democratic Party he was sentenced to 27 months in a federal penitentiary and fined $1.2 million.
*On October 4, 2003, after receiving another message of “divine guidance,” Macapagal-Arroyo declared that she was in the running.
*On July 27, 2003, the CPP fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed to govern without a coalition. Ranariddh and Sam Rainsy declared they would not help the CPP form a government unless Hun Sen resigned. Motorcycle death squads were then unleashed on the streets of Phnom Penh. In one week in October, half a dozen public figures opposed to Hun Sen were shot dead. In July 2004, Ranariddh agreed to join a coalition government, with Hun Sen as prime minister. Rainsy refused.
*Lacson wasn’t arrested, and on November 12, 2003, Quezon City judge Theresa Yadao dismissed the case against him, finding “a lack of probable cause for arrest.” Government prosecutors appealed the decision. On May 10, 2004, Lacson lost the presidential election to Gloria Arroyo.